Seascapes

Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges

Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, & Kären Wigen (eds.)

Publication Year: 2007

Historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world.
The essays presented here take a variety of approaches. One group examines the material, cultural, and intellectual constructs that inform and explain historical experiences of maritime regions. Another set discusses efforts—some more successful than others—to impose political and military control over maritime regions. A third group focuses on issues of social history such as labor organization, information flows, and the development of political consciousness among subaltern populations. The final essays deal with pirates and efforts to control them in Mediterranean, Japanese, and Atlantic waters.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

The essays in this volume originated at a research conference on “Seascapes,
Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges” held in February 2003 at
the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The conference represented
part of a larger effort to build bridges between the various fields of area studies
scholarship that focus on well-defined world regions by accentuating the ...

Introduction

To judge from movie marquees, tourist brochures, or bestseller lists,
seascapes loom large in the public imagination. Yet on the mental
maps of most scholars, oceans are oddly occluded. Geographically
marginal to the grids of academic inquiry, the watery world seems to fall between
our conceptual cracks as well. When not ignored altogether, maritime
topics are routinely relegated to subfields on shipping or migration, pirates or ...

Constructs

1. Islands in the Making of an Atlantic Oceania, 1500-1800

Civilizations think about islands in very different ways. The inhabitants
of precolonial Polynesia saw themselves as inhabiting a sea of
islands, connected rather than divided by water and thus more like
an aqueous continent. “Their universe comprised not only land surfaces, but
the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it,” writes
Epile Hau‘ofa, “Their world was anything but tiny.”¹ For them the sea was ...

2. Vessels of Exchange: The Global Shipwright in the Pacific

Maritime ethnographers and archaeologists have always held the
ship to be more than a simple inanimate object. Instead, it is a
complex cultural artifact, a record of specific seafaring traditions
and regional variations. And ships, which carry numerous items of trade, can
themselves be traded, altered, and redefined. The transoceanic exchange in
this case is the adoption and continued use of traditions in nautical technology ...

3. Maritime Ideologies and Ethnic Anomalies: Sea Space and the Structure of Subalternity in the Southeast Asia Littoral

Empires

4. The Organization of Oceanic Empires: The Iberian World in the Habsburg Period

Globalization arguably began, not with the voyages of Columbus, but
with the treaties that claimed to divide the non-European world
into Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence, including exclusive
seaborne channels of exploration and communication. In the early sixteenth
century both Iberian powers established commercial and governmental ...

5. The Ottoman "Discovery" of the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century

Vasco da Gama’s successful voyage around the Cape of Good Hope
in 1497 has long been recognized as a major turning point in world
history, marking the beginning of direct and continuous contact between
the civilizations of Western Europe and the Indian Ocean. Much less
well known to modern scholarship, by comparison, is the Ottoman Empire’s ...

6. Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? The Legal Geography of the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1660-1825

As Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
the essence of modern capitalism is its commitment to quotidian
regularity, gradual accumulation, and the rule of law; but for
these qualities, the ethos of the commercial bourgeoisie would be indistinguishable
from that of the premodern brigand. For Weber, the chief exemplar ...

In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam
Smith asserted that human beings have a propensity to “truck, barter,
and exchange one thing for another.”¹ In this view of the world, trading
developed because individual people knew—almost innately—what they
wanted, as well as how and where to acquire it. But residents of the eighteenth-
century Atlantic World were not free to engage in any commerce ...

Sociologies

8. "Tavern of the Seas"? The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The Cape of Good Hope was the major crossroads for European ships
traversing the Atlantic and Indian oceans between Europe and Asia,
until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Situated at the southernmost
tip of the African continent, the stunning vista of Table Mountain,
the spectacular scenery of the Cape Peninsula, and the tumultuous seas ...

For much of their history, from the dawn of human settlement to recent
times, the islands of the West Indian archipelago have been
peopled by the product of seaborne diasporas. Beginning with the
Amerindians over 5,000 years ago, the ebb and fl ow of human conflict and
expansion has contributed to successive waves of inward and outward migration ...

10. Race, Migration, and Port-City Radicalism: West Indian Longshoremen and the Politics of Empire, 1880-1920

The association of migration to Panama with death, as the epigraph to
this chapter suggests, reflected the harrowing conditions of building
one of the world’s most complex waterways. Although West Indian
workers were commonly viewed as shiftless, ignorant, and unreliable tropical
laborers, they performed the lowest paid and most dangerous assignments ...

11. South Asian Seafarers and Their Worlds: c. 1870-1930s

Despite providing the plots and the characters for some outstanding
works of historical scholarship in which they appear to offer unrecovered
redoubts of lost ideals (whether revolutionary republicanism
or radical Afro-American cosmopolitanism), seafarers have not been
an enduring focus of interest to the historical profession.

Transgressors

12. Marking Water: Piracy and Property in the Premodern West

Discourse around the political entity, or polity, has often been informed
by concretized notions of what Marvin Becker called the
“territorial state”—defined by Max Weber as a “compulsory organization
with a territorial basis.”¹ Weber’s reference to compulsion nonetheless
implies that the state is an improvised, artificial construct. ...

13. With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan

14. The Pirate and the Gallows: An Atlantic Theater of Terror and Resistance

In the early afternoon of July 12, 1726 William Fly ascended Boston’s
gallows to be hanged for piracy. His body was nimble in manner like a
sailor going aloft; his rope-roughened hands carried a nosegay of flowers;
his weather-beaten face had “a Smiling Aspect.” He showed no guilt,
no shame, no contrition. Indeed, as Cotton Mather, the presiding prelate,
noted, he “look’d about him unconcerned.” But once he stood upon the ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.